A Community Tug of War in Brooklyn

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Three community districts share sanitation and other responsibilities at the 22-acre project that includes the Barclays Center. A long-simmering tensions is beginning to boil over among officials.CreditYana Paskova for The New York Times

If a building complex straddles the intersection of three community districts in New York, which community board should claim jurisdiction over the buildings’ garbage collection, sidewalk modifications and other assorted concerns?

When the development is the 22-acre magnet for controversy known as Atlantic Yards, the complex that includes the Barclays Center, what might otherwise be an arcane administrative riddle shape-shifts into an impassioned argument that touches on the delicate questions of neighborhood identity and the future of a fast-growing part of Brooklyn.

As a local watchdog journalist, Norman Oder, wrote on his blog, Atlantic Yards Report: “Is Atlantic Yards more like (and part of) Downtown Brooklyn, or is it, in part or in whole, a piece of Prospect Heights? Or even, in part, an appendage of Park Slope?”

Or as Frank Gehry, the architect originally commissioned to design the complex, once said, is Atlantic Yards essentially a new neighborhood, built “practically from scratch”?

For the members of these community boards, the issue has a personal resonance. Though many of them spent nearly a decade battling to keep Atlantic Yards from rising in the first place, they have come to feel possessive about it. If they must live with it, they argue, they should have some say over its impact.

“It’s important for the Atlantic Yards to stay within Community Board 8’s jurisdiction after all we’ve been through,” the board’s chairwoman, Nizjoni Granville, told the website DNAinfo. “It’s an emotional issue for me.”

Geographically, the project appears to sit in Prospect Heights, most of which falls under Community Board 8. The top half of Atlantic Yards belongs to Community Board 2, which also covers Fort Greene to the north and Downtown Brooklyn to the northwest, among other neighborhoods. Community Board 6, which covers Park Slope, has a triangle of land that bites off part of the bottom half of the arena.

This Frankensteinian patchwork, the precise reasons for which have been lost to history, did not matter much when the area was just a railyard and its environs. Now, with a sports arena and hundreds of thousands of square feet in offices, shops and apartments at stake, the situation seems untenable.

The jurisdiction question has been simmering since last year, when the community boards discussed taking advantage of a City Charter provision that allows community districts to be redrawn every 10 years if City Hall initiates the process. A decade ago, when plans for Atlantic Yards had just been announced, redrawing the boundaries seemed premature to community board members. Since then, neither the Bloomberg nor the de Blasio administration has weighed in, leaving the question unsettled.

Forest City Ratner, the project’s developer, has remained neutral. Ashley Cotton, a spokeswoman for the developer, said all the districts would share local hiring and affordable housing opportunities regardless of what happens.

Yet Community Board 2 members cited those benefits when it voted on April 9 to corral the rest of Atlantic Yards without consulting the other two boards — “sort of kicking Community Boards 6 and 8 in the shins,” said Rob Perris, the district manager of Community Board 2.

In short, “we’re waiting for Solomon to appear,” said Craig Hammerman, the district manager of Community Board 6.

In this case, however, all parties agree that the baby must not be split.

Over the past decade, the community boards have had to weigh in on nearly every question related to Atlantic Yards’ impact, including traffic enforcement and liquor licensing for the Barclays Center, meaning extra meetings, extra phone calls and extra room for friction. Some residents say that the split between the three districts made it difficult to unify the opposition to the project in the first place.

Sitting atop three districts also means the project receives most of its city services from three different directions, an arrangement that will only grow more complex when people begin moving into the 6,430 apartments slated for construction. Currently, a Sanitation Department team from one district cleans before Barclays Center shows and another cleans after; the streets are divided about equally between three teams.

The development is not trisected in its policing: The boundaries of the 78th Police Precinct were redrawn two years ago to encompass all of Atlantic Yards. The rest of the precinct overlaps with Community Board 6, which has suggested that it could redraw its boundaries to match the precinct’s in the interest of coordinating municipal services for the area more efficiently.

Community Board 8 has let it be known that since, geographically speaking, Atlantic Yards lies in Prospect Heights — and may be just the first of many high-rise developments marching into the rapidly gentrifying area — it would like to take responsibility. Yet some in Community Board 2 have argued that the high-rises of the project are more in character with the towers that already dot its Downtown Brooklyn territory.

At a recent meeting, the second vice chairman of Community Board 8 compared, in a semi-humorous spirit, Community Board 2’s redistricting to Russia’s annexation of Crimea.

The board wrote in a frosty letter to elected officials, including Mayor Bill de Blasio, that it “rejects” Community Board 2’s move, as well as any realignment of the boundaries that would “decimate” Prospect Heights by splitting it down Vanderbilt Avenue, which could happen if the borders are redrawn to match the 78th Precinct’s.

Community Board 6 has refrained from combative remarks, and Mr. Hammerman said it would take no official position before consulting the mayor’s office and the other boards.

Then there are the less tangible considerations. The behemoth development could be considered its own neighborhood, attracting thousands of residents, workers and visitors and spawning its own mini-economy.

But Gib Veconi, an advocate for Prospect Heights who waged a bitter campaign against Atlantic Yards, believes residents in his neighborhood will bear the brunt of the project’s ill effects. Keeping the project under a single board would focus community participation — and, if need be, opposition — as Atlantic Yards and its successors are built, he said.

“This project is going to evolve and all sorts of things are going to happen that nobody’s even thought of yet,” he said. “Beyond that — my God, look at the pace of development in Brooklyn. How long does anybody expect things to stay the way they are?”

Correction:

An article in some editions on Wednesday about a dispute among three community boards about which has jurisdiction over the Atlantic Yards development in Brooklyn misstated the uses of the property before a complex was built there. The area included a working rail yard, residential buildings and businesses. It was not an abandoned rail yard.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A18 of the New York edition with the headline: A Community Tug of War in Brooklyn. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe